Editing Income trust (section)

===Business===
Business income trusts are individual companies that have converted some or all of their stock equity into an income trust [[capital structure]] for tax reasons. Business income trusts are used in many sectors, such as manufacturing, food distribution, and power generation and distribution. They are not [[investment trust]]s in the classic sense, since they represent a single company's assets and not a pool of investments.

Among business trusts, utility trusts that invest in or operate [[public utility|public utilities]] such as [[electricity distribution]] or [[telecommunication]]s are sometimes put in a separate category as they are inherently less growth-focused.<ref>[http://www.investcom.com/incometrust/whatis.htm ''InvestCom'']</ref>

In the US, the business trust structure typically takes the form of publicly traded partnerships (PTPs) or [[master limited partnership]]s (MLPs), essentially [[limited partnership]]s (LPs) with units that trade on public securities exchanges.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ptpcoalition.org/PTPFAQs.htm|title=Coalition of|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050831010727/http://www.ptpcoalition.org/PTPFAQs.htm|archive-date=2005-08-31|access-date=2005-10-17|url-status=dead}}</ref> Those were very popular in the mid-1980s but are rare today. Revised IRS tax treatment of MLPs made the structure inefficient and infeasible, in light of the special tax that is levied on MLP owners who hold them in tax-deferred or exempt accounts such as [[401(k)]]s, [[individual retirement account|IRA]]s, and [[Roth IRA]]s. A more recent alternative called income depositary shares (IDS) has also failed to attract investor attention due to the trust activity being focused on the Canadian market.